The Problem and Necessity of Election
The doctrine of election is both
problematic and necessary for the church’s self-understanding and mission
and, as such, merits the church’s attention. If it were not problematic, we
would not need to discuss it because its meaning would be self-evident. If
it were not necessary, we would not need to discuss it but could simply
dispense with it. But because it is both problematic and necessary, however,
Christians need to find fresh ways of wrestling with this most vexed
theological claim, that God makes choices between people.
David Novak defines election as “the
choice of one person over another out of a range of possible candidates.”[1]
This is a generic, non-theological definition that could apply equally well
to the election of the President of the United States or President of the
student council as to the election of the chosen people. Biblical election,
however, includes a further idea: “The choice then establishes a mutual
relationship between the elector and the elected, in biblical terms, a
‘covenant’ (berit.)”[2]
But this is precisely the aspect of election that that has proved to be
problematic, the notion that God specially chooses certain persons or groups
over others and enters into a unique relationship with them. There are
several reasons why this idea is controversial today. Mainline Christians,
beginning with the assumption that all people are inherently equal, might
recoil at the very suggestion that God would treat certain people with
special favor. Evangelicals might affirm the idea of election in principle,
but in practice emphasize more the role of conversion and acceptance of
Jesus as one’s personal Savior in the process of salvation. The doctrine of
election has been further undermined by its secularized misuse, rooted in
the Anglo-American Puritan mythology of chosenness[3],
to justify Western, and particularly American, imperialism. The belief in
one’s chosenness can all too easily be exploited for nefarious ends, as with
the Florida school district that required schools to teach children that
America is superior to all other nations.[4]
These and other factors make it difficult to speak coherently about the
doctrine of election.
But the other aspect of my thesis is
that we must speak about election because it is essential to
Christian faith. In the first place, “The divine election of Israel is one
of the major themes of the Hebrew Bible.”[5]
And because we get our theological bearings from Scripture, the centrality
of election in the Bible tells us something necessary about the God of the
Bible, namely, that God elects. Election is often assumed to come from a
narrow, limited, parochial view of God, but in fact just the opposite is the
case. The universality of the biblical God is the root of election. “[O]nly
a God who is over the whole world has options to elect or not to elect, and
to elect this people rather than that people.”[6]
But in the second place, the reality of election is confirmed by experience.
It points to one of the great mysteries of faith -- that God seems to insist
on working through specific peoples, persons, times and places; that God’s
actions are not timeless but located in history; that God, in fact, does not
“treat everyone the same” but encounters people in unique ways. Election
does not begin with a theoretical axiom but with a lived reality: some hear
the voice of God or feel the touch of God with greater clarity and intensity
than others. Some appropriate the faith of their parents and the promise of
their baptism, while others reject it. Some sit in church and respond to the
invitation of the Gospel with enthusiasm; while others sit in the same
church and respond with indifference. The hearts and ears of some are opened
and those of others are closed. How are we to account for this? Jesus put it
best: “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and
bear fruit – fruit that will last.” (John 15:16) This is an experimental as
well as a dogmatic assertion; it has been the source of depth and strength
in Christian faith over the centuries. If the church is to understand itself
as more than simply a voluntary association of persons held together only by
shared interests, attitudes and lifestyles, then election will shape our
understanding of Christian faith.
The Priority of God in Election
We must begin with the right
questions if we are to make sense of election: not, “Who are the elect?” but
“Who is this God who elects?” The first purpose of the doctrine of election,
in other words, is to explicate the nature and actions of God and only
secondarily to ponder the composition of the elect. This sounds like stating
the obvious, and yet many of the problems with the doctrine of election
arise precisely because it is used more to speculate about the privileges of
the elect than to describe what the Church knows by faith about God. One
especially influential interpretation of election has gone something like
this: Out of the whole human race, God has chosen one group of persons, a
separate, distinct, called-out remnant, to be the beneficiaries of divine
favor and salvation. The story of salvation will be completed when this
group is finally gathered into “heaven” to live in eternal bliss; and
separated eternally from the rest of humanity who are condemned to
punishment. In some versions of this account, the elect correspond to a
visible community and their identity is immediately and self-evidently
verifiable by their righteousness, blessedness, giftedness or piety. In
other versions, the true composition of the elect is hidden from view and
known only to God. Both accounts, however, share a this in common: they are
overly concerned with identifying the chosen distinguishing them from the
not-chosen.
In an important essay, Woflhart
Pannenberg takes issue with the foundations of this “exclusivist” approach,[7]
which, he says, is rooted in a particular interpretation of the Deuteronomic
theology of history. This tradition begins with the liberation of Israel
from Egypt and the calling-out of Israel to live with God in a special
relationship of covenant fidelity. It describes Israel’s identity as the
chosen, covenant people as one of distinctiveness from the other nations.
God has
delivered [the nations]over to you… Make no treaty with them, and show them
no mercy. Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their
sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your sons
away from following me to serve other gods … Break down their altars, smash
their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in
the fire. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God
has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his
people, his treasured possession. (Deut 7: 2-6)
Only by maintaining strict
separation from the other nations would Israel avoid being ensnared by their
idolatry (Deut 12: 29-31.) “The ostensive purpose of the instruction [in
Deuteronomy] is to warn Israel about the seduction of the land of
Canaan and to urge Israel to adhere to its particular identity as
YHWH’s chosen people.”[8]
The Deuteronomic narrative concludes with the catastrophe of the Babylonian
exile which it interprets as a punishment for Israel/Judah’s persistent
unfaithfulness in refusing to maintain their separateness from the other
nations.
The gracious liberation of Israel
from bondage and the gifts of law and land are among the most important
biblical themes. However, Pannenberg argues, too exclusive a reliance on
this strand of the narrative has distorted the doctrine of election. What
originated as a testimony to God’s unmerited grace in choosing and blessing
Israel, over time developed into a theory about the ultimate destiny of
individuals. By the post-exilic and intertestamental periods, election had
become a matter of distinguishing the righteous from the unrighteous. In the
Book of Enoch, for example, election no longer means God’s purposeful
constitution of a faithful community but has been reduced to God’s
miraculous foreknowledge of the identity of the righteous.[9]
When election is understood in this way, the identifying and gathering of
the elect becomes the goal of salvation and election is disconnected from
the wider horizon of God’s redemptive activity. Furthermore, the main
concern of election is “the expectation of a future life beyond death for
the individual, in order to provide adequate compensation for human actions,
be they good or bad.”
[10] Pannenberg argues that
this “postexilic concept of election as an eternal decision of God (hidden
in the present world) concerning the final salvation of a certain number of
individuals” became a dominant perspective in early Christianity, exerting a
deleterious effect on the Church’s proclamation of the Gospel.
The focus of election on individual
salvation has also blurred the distinction between election and the related,
but subordinate, category of predestination. When election theology is
removed from the field of salvation history and located on the plane of “an
eternal decision of God, made before creation,” its main concern becomes the
metaphysical perfections of the God of speculative theism rather than the
economy of salvation.[11]
The theo-logic goes like this: Election expresses the will of God concerning
salvation. God is not subject to temporal change. Therefore, salvation must
be fixed in eternity and not affected by what actually happens in this
world. Election means the determination of each person’s final destiny
before time and creation.
Election and the Economy of Salvation
This way of thinking about the
doctrine does not work any longer. Election needs to help us make sense out
of God’s actual dealings with humanity in history and not provide a theory
about what happens outside of time. Conversations with Jewish theologians,
such as David Novak, have helped to clarify the historicity of election.
Novak builds his own theology of election on the pioneering work of Franz
Rosenzweig who saw election as inextricably tied to revelation. Rosenzweig
argued that the God of Israel is always moving from hiddenness and
disclosure, from distance to proximity. “God’s transcendence is not God’s
being away from the world; rather, it is God’s moving away from
his self-enclosure and coming towards the direct object of his choice
in the world.”[12]
This “coming towards” the world in revelation always takes the form of God’s
personal address to human creatures.[13]
Now, a personal address, by definition, is spoken to and heard by a
particular recipient; in other words, not everyone is addressed by God in
the same way. By addressing human beings personally, God necessarily makes
choices or distinctions between them. Rosenzweig is part of that twentieth
century movement in philosophy and theology that asserted the priority of
existence over essence and qualified “the transcendence of the universal by
the particularity of human existence.”[14]
Revelation does not refer to the natural disclosure of “the way things are,”
but to a personal address that can neither be abstracted into a generality
nor reduced to some more foundational reality.[15]
This is the onto-theological ground of a proper understanding of election,
according to Novak. It is in stark contrast to the tradition of Spinoza, who
believed that something true was precisely something not conditioned by
history or particularity. Truth, according to Spinoza, is universal and
necessary, therefore non-historical.[16]
According to Spinoza, God did not elect Israel, Israel elected God. Both
election and covenant were simply means by which Jewish life could be
regulated.[17]
Rosenzweig has obvious affinities
with Karl Barth for whom election was not to be interpreted as a “datum of
natural existence” or a general statement about the nature of humanity in
the world, but first and foremost as the election of Jesus Christ through
whom God reveals Godself as being “for” humanity. The election of human
communities and individuals is related to the basic election of the man
Jesus in whom also dwells the fullness of the electing God.[18]
Barth provides an essential template upon which the doctrine of election can
be understood. What God elects to do, according to Barth, is to say “Yes” to
the world and the human race, even though they may say “No” to God.[19]
In Jesus Christ, God makes this choice known.[20]
Election is not grounded in an idea or an axiom but an in a concrete,
personal and historical event. From both Jewish and Christian perspectives,
then, we find an attempt to fashion a deeply relational account of election,
grounded in the nature of the biblical God who approaches and addresses
humankind personally.
André LaCoque’s study of the
revelation of the Divine Name in Exodus 3:14 underlines the “face-to-face”
quality of God’s self-communication with humanity. The Name “is no
atemporal, ahistorical, abstract axiom about divine aseity”[21]
but the disclosure that God has elected to enter into “a shared history
between God and humanity.”[22]
Echoing Pannenberg, LaCoque portrays God’s electing work as fundamentally
historical and therefore particular. “Revelation of the Name by its very
nature stresses exclusivity,” LaCoque argues.[23]
“The philosophical concepts of transcendence, omnipotence, infinitude” –
(the building blocks of the Protestant doctrine of election) – “must be
considered sub specie historiae instead of sub specie aeternitatis
et absoluti.”[24]
To understand the Divine Name does not require us to penetrate the eternal
mysteries of God but to wrestle with the concrete ways in which God actually
deals with human beings. Thus, the Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod
insists on the irreducible character of Israel’s “carnality.” “All attempts
to transform [Israel’s] election into a universal election of all people in
faith can be interpreted by Israel only as the beginning of that movement
toward the universal which, fully developed, culminates to the universal
truth of a philosophy which is antithetical to the concreteness of the God
of Abraham.”[25]
Richard John Neuhaus argues for the same basic theological concreteness:
“specificity is all in Christianity – a specific person, a specific place, a
specific time. The Gnostics – then and now – are full of ‘spiritualizing’
generalities. But God’s plan of salvation – then and now – has everything to
do with the thus-and-soness of things.”[26]
These twentieth century theologians
all see election as an historical rather than a speculative doctrine. It
finds its origin and meaning in the fundamental concreteness of God’s
self-revelation to human beings. Persons and communities are not elected in
an abstract or theoretical sense but in the particularity of their existence
as creatures before God. Election refers to the way in which God draws us
into the ongoing narrative of salvation. If the doctrine of election is to
speak meaningfully to the people of God today, it must be conceived in these
terms.
How are we to avoid the arrogance,
chauvinism and exclusivity that seems to be the natural consequence of any
claim of election? Election seems to carry the risk of a sense of hidden
superiority, that domineering magnanimity that uses false humility to wield
power; like Anthony Trollope’s Jemima Stanbury who “did not expect others to
be as self-sacrificing, as charitable and as good as herself. It was not
that she gave herself credit for such virtues; but she thought of herself as
one who, from the peculiar circumstances of life, was bound to do much for
others. There was no end to her doing good for others – if only the others
would allow themselves to be governed by her.”[27]
How can Christians proclaim divine election and not seem to be claiming
a privileged status?
One way to mitigate this risk is to
distinguish between election and salvation. Again, we turn to Wolfhart
Pannenberg who argues that, just as election should not be confused with
predestination, so it should not be confused with salvation. The classical
Protestant view is that election and salvation mean the same thing. So we
read in the Canons of Dort:
Holy
Scripture … bears witness that not all people have been chosen but that some
have not been chosen or have been passed by in God’s eternal election –
those, that is, concerning whom God, on the basis of his entirely free, most
just, irreproachable, and unchangeable good pleasure, made the following
decision: to leave them in the common misery into which, by their own fault,
they have plunged themselves; not to grant them saving faith and the grace
of conversion; but finally to condemn and eternally punish them … not only
for their unbelief but also for all their other sins, in order to display
his justice. (Article 15)
Pannenberg argues, against
Protestant orthodoxy, that God elects people not to salvation but to
mission. In other words, God chooses communities and individuals to
contribute to an end more comprehensive than their own personal salvation.
The salvation of the individual “is connected with his mission of serving
the more universal purpose of God.”[28]
Election has to be interpreted within the wider context of God’s redemption
and restoration of the world. In making this argument, Pannenberg broadens
the biblical background of election to include not only the Deuteronomic
idea of Israel’s uniqueness among and separateness from the nations, but the
tradition of Abraham whose election included a mission to be being a
blessing to all the families of the earth (Gen 12:3.)
Certainly, election and salvation
are related. Both doctrines testify to the unmerited love of God. When God
elects a community or a person it is never the consequence of human
achievement but only of divine grace and freedom. This is expressed by God’s
choice of Israel:
It is not
because you were more numerous than other people that the Lord set his heart
on you and chose you – for you were the fewest of all peoples. It was
because the Lord loved you and kept his oath that he swore to your
ancestors, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand, and
redeemed you from the house of slavery … (Deut 7: 7-9.)
The early Christians saw themselves
as sharers in the same providential grace of God and so the Apostle Paul
wrote to the Church at Corinth:
Consider
your own call, brothers and sisters. Not many of you were wise by human
standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God
chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak
in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the
world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no
one might boast in the presence of God… ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in
the Lord.’” (1 Cor 1: 26-31.)
And so we see that both election and
salvation operate within the sphere of God’s free grace, effective
independently of human accomplishment. This means that election can be
revoked without imperiling the ultimate faithfulness of God in salvation.
Election is neither unconditional nor irrevocable but dependent upon the
acceptance and faithful discharging of the mission for which one has been
marked. God could “reject” the chosen people Israel for a time and yet
remain faithful to God’s determination to save them. The same Book of
Deuteronomy that Pannenberg identifies as a primary source of an
“exclusivist” view of election lays down another indispensable principle,
that election entails responsibility. Israel must not to take their election
for granted. Because they were unfaithful,
“I will
hide my face from them,” [God] said, “and see what their end will be; for
they are a perverse generation, children who are unfaithful. They made me
jealous by what is no god and angered me with their worthless idols. I will
make them envious by those who are not a people; I will make them angry by a
nation that has no understanding … I will heap calamities upon them and
spend my arrows against them” (Deut 32: 19-23)
“You only have I chosen of all the
families of the earth,” Yahweh declares through the prophet Amos; “therefore
I will punish you for all your sins” (Am 3:2.) The Hebrew (raq etkhem
yad’ati) means literally “you only have I known”, i.e., have
brought into a relationship of personal intimacy. David Novak stresses the
importance of being known by God as the foundation of election. This
knowledge awakens both the possibility of and the responsibility to obey
God. “Israel is intimately known by God and is to act based upon her
intimate experience of that knowledge.”[29]
It is precisely because they are the elect that Israel and the church
are called to live accountable lives. Assuming that election may
legitimately be extended to include those known by their faith in Christ,
then the same expectation applies to Christians as well. “The elected one is
accountable to God for the performance of his mission,” Pannenberg writes,
and this accountability “in the context of God’s further purpose in history
entails the possibility of his failure and consequently of his rejection or
reprobation.”[30]
The biblical narrative evidences time and again that God employs election to
further the work of salvation and is not above radically reconfiguring the
elect in order to bring about that ultimate purpose.
This is not to say that election is
purely instrumental, however. Election is more than a mere means to an end.
Again, Jewish dialogue partners have been helpful in reminding us of this.
David Novak argues strenuously that God’s election of Israel is irreducible
to any other category and that the covenant between Israel and God has its
own inviolable integrity. He criticizes those who would view “the election
of Israel as a means to a higher end” such as “the election of humanity
itself.”[31]
And certainly, election loses some of its gracious majesty and mystery if it
is viewed simply as a means to something else.
At the same time, however, the
ultimate theological horizon for both Christians and Jews is the promised
restoration of creation to its intended harmony and goodness. In that sense,
every act and decision of God is provisional because it plays a part in the
realization of this final goal.[32]
Michael Wyschogrod notes that Israel’s election “is for service” and “a sign
of the infinite and unwarranted gift of God rather than inherent superiority
of the people.”[33]
We began this paper by quoting David Novak’s definition of election and
covenant. His statement standing alone might seem to make God into an
exclusive tribal deity and the elect into God’s privileged elite. But, Novak
makes the following important qualification: “Election also promises its
ultimate purposes will be fulfilled, which is to bring the whole world
finally into the covenant, that is , redemption.”[34]
Being elected by God necessarily involves a commitment to the future destiny
of God’s world.[35]
Despite a plurality of views on the precise nature of election, we can say
that Israel’s election was intended to produce a community “that praises
God’s name before the nations and calls upon the nations to sing God’s
praises as well.”[36]
The church can begin to rehabilitate
its understanding of election by recognizing that election is always
oriented towards mission. Realizing this has two important consequences.
First, it invests the church’s life and ministry with a much more profound
significance than if it is understood merely as the good intentions or
shared affinities of its members. Today, the church is finding itself in a
socially marginal and vulnerable situation similar to that of the early
Christian movement. Surrounded by a hostile or indifferent culture,
congregations struggle with their sense of purpose and self-worth. The
doctrine of election declares that the people of God are constituted by
God’s choice. The true character of the church is not derived from its
organizational success but from the fact that it has been summoned by God to
testify to what God is doing in the world:
But you are chosen people, a royal priesthood,
a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty
acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once
you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not
received mercy, but now you have received mercy (1 Pet 2: 9-10.)
The second consequence, however, is
that any sense of Christian superiority is invalidated because God’s
electing work is wholly independent of human status or accomplishment,
including such status as would be derived from correct doctrine or pious
living.
Individual and Corporate Election
Barth and others have emphasized
that election in the Bible is primarily a corporate idea. God elects a
community; the elect status of individuals derives from their inclusion in
that community. Certainly, this is the primary meaning of election. But the
biblical narrative is a tapestry of elections in which God chooses not only
a covenant people but individual persons to make specific, timely and unique
contributions to God’s involvement with the world. The prophets are chosen,
often against their will (Jer 1: 4-8.). Bezalel and Oholiab are chosen to
build and equip the tabernacle (Ex 31.) In the New Testament, Jesus
appropriates the (probably) communal confession of Isaiah 61 to describe his
own ministry:
The
Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God has anointed me to preach good
news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives,
recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (Isaiah 61: 1-2; Luke 4:
18-19.)
This is surely an election text,
both in its original and applied context. Other Gospel stories underline
God’s election of individuals. Mary, the mother of Jesus, chosen for no
discernible earthly reason, accepts her mission. “I am the handmaid of the
Lord,” she replies to the angel. “May it be to me as you have said” (Luke
1:37.)[37]
By contrast, James and John badly misinterpret the meaning of election,
assuming that their status as chosen disciples entitles them to lobby for
seats of honor in the kingdom (Mark 10:36.) Jesus corrected them by
acknowledging that they had indeed been elected – elected to drink his cup
and share his baptism of suffering – but that positions in the kingdom were
not his to dispense. The Apostle Paul relates Ananias’s interpretation of
Paul’s Damascus Road experience in terms of both chosenness and a commission
to witness: “[Ananias] said, ‘The God of our ancestors has chosen you to
know his will, to see the Righteous One and to hear his own voice; for you
will be his witness to all the world of what you have seen and heard’” (Acts
22:14.) Paul in turn taught the Corinthians that the work of the Holy Spirit
in their lives was a work of personal and unique selection for gifted
ministry: “To each has been given the manifestation of the Spirit for the
common good” (1 Cor 12:7.) In addition to illuminating the nature of the
people of God, election gives a framework of theological significance to the
vocations and contributions of individuals.
Election and
Rejection
When it is understood that election
is about grace and mission, not piety and privilege, the doctrine can be
freed from the perception that God plays favorites. One of the great
difficulties in talking about election is that the choice of some seems
automatically to imply the rejection of others. This concern needs to be
dealt with on a couple of levels.
First, biblical election inverts
worldly orders of status and power. God does not necessarily choose the
mighty or the influential. Patterns of biblical election have a powerful
element of surprise, in the choice of the younger over the elder (Jacob over
Esau, David over his ten older brothers) or of the marginalized or the
barren over the wealthy and fecund (Sarah, Hannah, Mary.) Election can be
neither managed nor controlled. God will choose whom God will choose, often
to the astonishment of God’s own people. It is difficult to appreciate the
seismic shift in theological understanding that must have been required for
the exilic community to hear Isaiah speak of King Cyrus of Persia as God’s
“anointed” (Is 45:1); or for the first-generation church to accept the
election of Saul of Tarsus, Hebrew of Hebrews and Pharisee of Pharisees, as
apostle to the Gentiles. The temptation to claim privilege on the basis of
election is ever-present, but must be always counteracted by the prophetic
word of God’s freedom. The elect do not correspond to structures of
political, social or religious influence, even though God does not eschew
working through those structures as well. Election furnishes no cause for
boasting, save in the Lord (1 Cor 1:31.)
Beyond this general observation,
however, is the deeper point that while we are free to speak of election, we
may not speculate about rejection. Those who have been chosen by God can
rejoice in their favor; but they are not permitted to make judgments about
who has not been elected. The great Dutch Reformed dogmatician G. C.
Berkouwer deals with this issue at length in his study, Divine Election.[38]
Berkouwer is concerned to rescue the Reformed understanding of election from
the perception of divine arbitrariness that it seems to convey. Protestant
theology, in its zeal to accentuate God’s sovereignty and human depravity,
ends with a theological monstrosity, a God whose actions are pure will to
power. This has more to do with late medieval nominalism which viewed God as
absolutely sovereign and utterly beyond human understanding than with the
biblical witness, according to Berkouwer.[39]
God’s ways are certainly unsearchable in the sense that we can understand
them only insofar as God graciously accommodates Godself to our limitations;
“but they are the ways not of an arbitrary God but of a God who guides all
things towards the goal that He has set.”[40]
A true appreciation of election counteracts the impression of God’s
capriciousness:
God’s wisdom contradicts the arbitrariness of man. God’s
acts are not irrational, without reason, coherence, perspective, and
constancy, but meaningful and comprehensible. The whole mystery of salvation
is the opposite of arbitrariness. Only he who does not surrender to it in
faith and repentance discovers, because of his own stubbornness and
blindness, arbitrariness in God’s acts. And he must listen to the word from
on high, the word of the free and sovereign God, whom to oppose is the
greatest irrationality and the worst arbitrariness…. Man who does not
understand the depths of divine wisdom, nor the riches of election, who
wants only to live in his belief in the non-arbitrariness of his own works
and morality, can see only arbitrariness in the sovereign freedom of God.[41]
The arbitrariness that Berkouwer identifies leads to a kind of theological
balancing act or symmetry between election and rejection. This is the
so-called “double predestination” in which the status of the elect, fixed
before time, is mirrored by an equal and opposite decree of damnation.
Berkouwer sees this as a deep distortion of the Gospel. God gives salvation
and “desires that everyone be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth”
(1 Tim 2:4.) Separation from God is only and always the consequence of human
sin, not the will of God. To erect a symmetrical structure in which election
and rejection stand in a parallel relation to one another is the fruit of
human speculation; and its practical consequence is an unseemly
preoccupation with the identity of the non-elect. It is at this point,
Berkouwer argues, that election becomes a vicious teaching, rather than the
evangelical counsel it was intended to be.
The Church may talk of election with joy and thanksgiving because it
testifies to the gracious manner in which God accomplishes God’s redemptive
purposes. But the Church may not speculate about who is left out of the
elect, first, because, as Scripture demonstrates, God chooses the most
unlikely candidates for mission, and, secondly, because election is not a
means of distinguishing the saved from the damned.
Alternative Biblical Readings
Rethinking the doctrine of election will involve new readings of the
biblical witness and an awareness that there are plural traditions within
the Bible itself concerning the electing God. Pannenberg, as we have seen,
attributes the distortions in the doctrine in part to a single-minded focus
on one theology of history which emphasizes the exclusivity and separateness
of the community of faith. But this is not the only way that the Scriptures
construe Israel’s history. The Abrahamic tradition, to which we have already
referred, gives us some alternative ways of thinking about election. One of
the constructive fruits of biblical criticism is to show how pluriform the
biblical canon really is. The canon itself makes different uses of the same
traditions and provides resources for its own reinterpretation. James A.
Sanders has noted, for example, how the promise of a land to Abraham is used
in two very different contexts. In the aftermath of the Babylonian
destruction, Ezekiel criticizes the exilic community for using Abraham as a
source of false consolation to evade their own culpability; while a
generation later, Second Isaiah appeals to the same tradition as a source of
great hope and encouragement.[42]
Walter Brueggemann has noted the “rather spectacular” emergence of the
Abrahamic tradition at the stage in Jewish history where God’s word of
forbearance and grace needed to be heard with special clarity. The
Deuteronomic history, dominated “by the demanding tradition of the Torah
linked to Moses,” culminated theologically in the punitive and purifying
destruction of Jerusalem. But the exilic community “turned from the rigorous
conditionality of Moses to the free promise of God made at the outset to
Abraham and Sarah. Thus the exilic community found in the memory of that
promise a ground of hope when the claim of Torah obedience was no longer
adequate.”[43]
Since the biblical canon itself permits alternative readings, I would argue
that we can draw on Abraham’s election to be a blessing to all the families
of the earth to develop a more balanced theology of election. Kendall Soulen
has argued that the classic version of the doctrine of election has focused
too much on the issue of redemption and the overcoming of sin and the Fall.
Using the work of Claus Westermann, Soulen suggests that the Bible describes
not only an economy of redemption but also an “economy of mutual blessing”
in which Israel’s mission is to be a blessing to the nations. This
necessarily involves blessing those who are and remain different from them,
since it is God’s will that the earth be home to a diversity of families and
nations. In his sophisticated exegesis, Soulen brings to the fore some
neglected biblical traditions in which the nations figure prominently as
recipients of God’s favor in their own right, not as merely negative foils
to the elect status of Israel. The goal of election, then, is not to fence
off a homogeneous community of the saved but to be God’s instrument for
blessing all “the households of creation.”
The Necessity of Election
We
have to be concerned with election because it tells us something essential
about God. God does not deal in abstractions or generalities but in concrete
particularities. Election also tells us that our lives and vocations are
endowed with transcendent significance. How we live is determined not only
by the choices we make but by the fact that we are chosen by God. A life of
Christian faithfulness is not just an expression of our autonomous free will
but a path laid down for us by God. Churches today are demoralized by a
sense of their own pointlessness and triviality. To ground our faith in the
knowledge and experience of an electing God is to see the church’s existence
as deeply involved in God’s drama of salvation.
At
the same time, Christians must learn to speak of their election
non-triumphalistically. The elect are often seen as the ones who will get a
place in the lifeboat when the ship goes down, or as the chosen few who get
seats at the banquet. An understanding of election that serves the Church
today will remind us that the privilege for which we are chosen is the
privilege of being appointed “to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last”
(Jn 15:16.)
